[Asterisk-Dev] IAX spec: Text formats and character sets

[Michael Giagnocavo]

>>Yea, I guess agreed on UTF-8 was too strong a phrase. People have said
>>ISO8859-1 is still in use by certain systems. I don't think anyone is
>>arguing that IAX shouldn't use Unicode. 
>>
>>I'm guessing that the main issue would be to use UTF-8 or UCS-2. It really
>>depends how much text is going to be non-ASCII. If you think that Asian
>>language users will be big consumers of IAX, then UTF-8 would be more of a
>>burden (processing as well as size). 
>>  
>>
>UCS-2 is totally brain dead. That is a non-starter. UCS-4 is too bulky. 
>Only UTF-8 makes any sense, and its ASCII compatible. Using UTF-8 is a 
>no-brainer.

Well, then, is it agreed? :). And I don't see why UCS-2 is "brain dead",
except for backwards compatibility (which is a good enough point, and what I
pointed out in my original post). If you do a lot of work in non-ASCII,
UTF-8 doesn't provide an advantage in space. As far as the higher Unicode
codepoints (above the 16-bit ones), I'm not aware of any systems actually
using them, so UCS-4 doesn't help things anyways.

-Michael